Are 2% tongkat and 10% the same, besides the dose?

They use the same raw material as a starting place, and both use the same solvents in the extraction. However, whenever you alter the extraction to concentrate more of one thing, you inevitably will alter the effects some. This means taking 5X of the 2% will not feel like taking the 10%. This is true for pretty much every plant extract out there. We do a lot of testing before we bring out new products. This often includes trials of various standardizations of the "same" product. Sometimes the dosing scales more linearly. Other times each standardization feels wildly different. The cool thing about plant extracts, which also makes them much more complex, is the fact that there is not usually just one or two actives in them. We set standardizations to the things that make the most sense, but there are tons of other things that alter the effects. Sometimes we learn new things and do more lab work to quantify other things, and based on this info we might later add new things to the standardization or come out with a completely different extract. It's pretty complex, and you will find that most companies over-simplify the science. This is especially true regarding standardizations.

We actually came up with a new term we use all the time now: STAG. That stands for standardized target analyte grouping. Let's say you have two products that both claim 5% withanolides. To the average person that might seem like they are the same thing. However, there are around 40 withanolides in ashwagandha, and roughly 580 withanolides known in nature. The US Pharmacopeia monograph only looks at 8 of them, and really only calibrates for one. Using our term, those 8 would be the STAG for that monograph. Essentially, the STAG is what you are defining as the actives. If one product is looking at the 8 withanolides in the USP monograph, and the other product is looking at 20, they are effectively defining different things with the same name. Consumers don't know that, though. They think 5% withanolides is all the same. This is why we set our own STAGs these days. We explicitly define the groupings of actives that we are calling X. I could sell you two ashwagandha extracts that claim 5% withanolides, but they would feel TOTALLY different from one another. The same goes for other things like Panax ginseng, Bacopa monnieri, kava, etc. What you define as your STAG for the product matters.

So how does this apply to tongkat? Well for now it doesn't to the standardization. We use a single active for both extract standardizations: eurycomanone. That doesn't mean it is the only active, and is doesn't mean we are satisfied with that. We are developing more enhanced analytical methods for tongkat that will be looking at other actives in the plant. To start, this will help us explain the effect differences between the extracts. However, it will also help us set new STAGs for the future, and possibly come out with other tongkat products that target different things. There is a lot in tongkat. We are talking polyphenols, quassinoids, squalenes, beta-carboline alkaloids, and even canthin-6-one alkaloids. So trying to look at a single compound as the end-all-be-all leaves out a lot of the specifics. The 2% certainly has more of some things than the 10% does, so they will feel different from one another. Hopefully soon we can quantify that difference in the lab.